Seven years and $260 billion later, big banks are nearing the end of their long legal nightmare. From dodgy mortgages to duff insurance, rigged rates to skirted sanctions, lenders have been paying the price for a wide range of misdeeds, as regulators dig deeper into their activities both before and after the financial crisis.
A letdown for the lira. A rough ride for the ringgit. The terrible tenge.
“What do you do?” is often one of the first questions you ask when meeting someone new. That’s because, for most people, identity is inextricably tied to work. Professionals, in particular, draw heavily on their work for a sense of identity—think of doctors, scientists, or high-level executives.
Let’s try this again! Six months after the last election, Turks will return to the polls to vote again. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan confirmed the snap election today (Aug. 22), with Nov. 1 as the likely date.
Last month, Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras nearly derailed a new bailout for Greece by calling a national referendum on the rescue’s proposed terms. In the end, voters rejected the measures, but Tsipras was forced to agree to creditors’ harsh conditions anyway.
In most places in the world, you can buy a lot for £513,000 ($806,000). But in London, that’s the going rate simply for putting a roof over your head.
The euro zone economy grew by 0.3% (pdf) in the second quarter versus the first. This fell short of expectations—analysts thought growth would be 0.4%, matching the pace of the previous quarter.
Wait, what?
The Economist, a jewel of the business media industry, is worth more than £950 million ($1.5 billion). We now know this because a 50% stake in the closely held weekly is changing hands for £469 million.
Unemployment is stubbornly stuck at around 13% in Italy and 23% in Spain. It may seem strange, then, that Adecco, the world’s largest staffing agency, is seeing its fastest growth in these places.
It is a “crisis within a crisis.” That’s how prime minister Alexis Tsipras describes the massive influx of migrants to Greece, straining the resources of a country that is already strapped for cash.
On a continent with no shortage of grim financial data, it takes effort to stand out. So congrats to Greek banks, which rose above—or rather, below—the pack to produce Europe’s ugliest chart:
What’s the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning? If you’re between the age of 18 and 24, it’s probably reach for your smartphone. According to a new report, half of young people in Britain check their phones within five minutes of waking up (one in five do it immediately).
China and Vietnam. Those are about the only places outside of Russia where people on the street are more likely than not to have confidence in Russian president Vladimir Putin’s handling of foreign policy.
If the financial world goes into meltdown again, one of these banks will probably be at the center of it. They are the so-called global systemically important banks, or G-SIBs, identified by regulators as any institution “whose distress or disorderly failure, because of its size, complexity and systemic interconnectedness, would cause significant disruption to the wider financial system and economic activity.”
For what is billed as Britain’s biggest privatization push since Thatcher, things have kicked off with a whimper. Nearly seven years after the UK government bailed out RBS, once the world’s largest bank by assets, it started to offload its shares today.
Unusually, Switzerland’s central bank has private shareholders and a listing on the stock exchange. Although it otherwise operates like a normal central bank, this is an important wrinkle.
In the euro zone, Greece’s debt drama has been stealing most of the headlines. But away from Athens, there was a rare batch of good news out of euroland today. Even more encouraging, it came from two of the currency union’s former basket cases: Ireland and Spain.
The numbers: Strong. Net profit at the German banking giant more than tripled in the second quarter, versus the same period last year. After a period of volatility, the bank has strung together a series of steadily improving quarterly results for the first time in quite a while.
Nothing brings people together like food and football—even the bitterly divided Cypriots, split between the Turkish-speaking north and Greek-speaking south since 1974.
Few thought that Yanis Varoufakis would hop on his motorcycle and ride off into the sunset, never to be heard from again. If anything, the outspoken former Greek finance minister’s ability to generate eye-catching headlines has been enhanced since his July 6 ouster after five eventful months in the job.
The length of an apologetic bow from a Japanese executive is a pretty good gauge of his embarrassment. And the 15-second bow by disgraced Toshiba CEO Hisao Tanaka—who resigned this week over a $1.2 billion accounting scandal—was a doozy.
One of the business-media world’s most-persistent rumors has finally come true: the Financial Times has been sold. The business newspaper’s owner, Pearson, confirmed the sale to Japan’s Nikkei Inc., for £844 million ($1.3 billion) in cash.
The numbers: Strong. The Swiss banking group comfortably beat expectations, recording a net profit of 1.1 billion Swiss francs ($1.2 billion) in the second quarter. That was the second-consecutive billion-franc quarter and represents a big swing from a loss in the same quarter last year, when the bank was hit by a big legal fine for helping American clients evade taxes.
